Drew Zahn

Oct. 19, 2012

'Dreams from My Real Father' proves hot to handle for tiny Midwest city

A tea party group in Fairfield, Iowa, had put up posters, advertised and spoken on the radio, excited about bringing filmmaker Joel Gilbert to town to show and answer questions about his Obama exposé, “Dreams from My Real Father.”

But then rumors of complaints began to circulate in this small city of 9,464, and controversy erupted. Only days before the Oct. 13 event, The Fairfield Arts & Convention Center, where the film was to be shown, cancelled the event until its board could evaluate whether such a politically hot-topic film would violate the Center’s non-profit status.

“Censorship has reached small town America, not just major metros where Democrats have more control,” Gilbert told WND at the time. “Iowa’s the middle of country; if we have censorship in little towns there, is there any hope for the First Amendment?”

Gilbert told WND the tea party group was suddenly out all its advertising dollars, and the plane ticket to Iowa he held in his hand was rendered pointless.

Four days after the event was scheduled to take place, however, the Center relented and agreed the film could be shown after all – with a few conditions.

“The promoter must present a clear disclaimer stating that the viewpoints represented in the film are those of the filmmaker and do not represent the viewpoints of the Center and that the movie contains subject matter that may be deemed offensive by some viewers,” the Center’s board of directors announced. “In turn, the Center will continue to offer others the right to rent the facility on the same basis, including standard rental fee, as it is being offered to this promoter. In addition, the Center will not sell tickets or promote or publicize the film in any manner.”

“We don’t want to limit political speech,” Rob Steinberg, the Center’s chairman of the board, told the Fairfield Ledger, “but limit the manner in which it is presented, because we don’t want to engage in political advocacy.”

Even though a Center donor reported the facility had previously shown “An Inconvenient Truth” from Al Gore and Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 911,” Center Director Rustin Lippincott told the Ledger he’s never received the amount of public feedback that this screening of “Dreams from My Real Father” has prompted.

“This is something that has never come to us before,” Lippincott said. “This is uncharted waters.”

Gilbert’s description of the film may reveal why it’s so controversial: “‘Dreams from My Real Father’ demonstrates that Obama has a deeply disturbing family background, which he intentionally obscured, to hide a Marxist political foundation. ‘Dreams from My Real Father’ is the story Barack Obama should have told, revealing his true agenda for ‘fundamentally transforming America.’”

Gilbert’s film shows how Obama sold himself to America as the multicultural ideal, a man who stood above politics. His father was a goat herder from Kenya, he told the electorate in 2008, so he would bring people together. Folks perceived Obama as a nice man with an inspiring family story.

In reality, Gilbert contends, Obama’s real father was Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party USA propagandist who likely shaped Obama’s worldview during his formative years.

Gilbert explained that while voters will overlook some fudging by politicians, promoting a false family background to hide an agenda irreconcilable with American values is a totally unacceptable manipulation of the electorate.

“Barack Obama must now come clean,” Gilbert insisted. “Instead of misrepresenting himself as he did in 2008, Obama should say, ‘My father was a Communist Party propagandist and suspected Soviet agent who indoctrinated me into Marxist ideology. Please vote for me so I can destroy the American middle class and create a one-party political system.’”

Gilbert emphasized the extensive research backing the claims made in his film: “I have been to Hawaii twice researching Obama’s inspiring family story of a Kenyan goat herder father. That is twice as many times as all of the mainstream media combined! Who could have imagined that news organizations with hundreds of reporters, and multi-million dollar budgets, wouldn’t investigate a presidential candidate’s background in 2008 and would ignore doing so again in 2012?”

His research extended to examine Chicago and the roots of the Frank Marshall Davis ideology.

“Davis joined the Communist party in Chicago, only 15 years after the Bolshevik Revolution,” Gilbert said. “You can hear the classic Marxism in Obama’s campaign, the ‘top 1 percent oppressing the 99 percent,’ and ‘you didn’t build your business, it was done on the backs of the proletariat,’ and so on. Marxism is a failed ideology that has no basis in fact in the American reality where the middle class has prospered and the issue of poverty is taken seriously.”

Gilbert said getting the American public to understand the official Obama nativity story is a fabrication will not be an easy task.

“Obama’s election was not a sudden political phenomenon,” he explained. “It was the culmination of an American socialist movement that Frank Marshall Davis nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii, and has been quietly infiltrating the U.S. economy, universities and media for decades.”